Virgin Land: The American West As Symbol and Myth, by Henry Nash Smith.

Copyright 1950 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Copyright 1978 by Henry Nash Smith. All rights reserved.

Hypertext version prepared by the American Studies Group at The University of Virginia 1995-96.
Editing and formatting and by Eric J. Gislason, February-March 1996.

AS@UVA Hypertexts

• Ian Finsith, Preface to the Hypertext Edition

• PROLOGUE: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ORIGINS

• BOOK ONE: PASSAGE TO INDIA
  • I. A Highway to the Pacific: Thomas Jefferson and the Far West

  • II. Passage to India: Thomas Hart Benton and Asa Whitney

  • III.The Untransacted Destiny: William Gilpin

  • IV. Walt Whitman and Manifest Destiny

• BOOK TWO: THE SONS OF LEATHERSTOCKING
  • V. Daniel Boone: Empire Builder or Philosopher of Primitivism?

  • VI. Leatherstocking and the Problem of Social Order

  • VII. The Innocence and Wildness of Nature: Charles W. Webber and Others

  • VIII. The Mountain Man as Western Hero: Kit Carson

  • IX. The Western Hero in the Dime Novel: I. From Seth Jones to Deadwood Dick

  • X. The Dime Novel Heroine

• BOOK THREE: THE GARDEN OF THE WORLD
  • XI. The Garden of the World and American Agrarianism

  • XII. The Yeoman and the Fee-Simple Empire

  • XIII. The South and the Myth of the Garden

  • XIV. The New Calculus of Western Energies

  • XV. The Agrarian Utopia in Politics: The Homestead Act

  • XVI. The Garden and the Desert

  • XVII. The Empire Redivivus

  • XVIII. Failure of the Agrarian Utopia

  • XIX. The Myth of the Garden and Reform of the Land System

  • XX. The Garden as Safety Valve

  • XXI. The Agricultural West in Literature: I. Cooper and the Stages of Society.
    II. From Caroline Kirkland to Hamlin Garland.
  • XXII. The Myth of the Garden and Turner's Frontier Hypothesis

• Virgin Land Hypertext Appendices (M. A. 96, 97)
  • Federal Statutes: The Public Lands (Chapter XIX, p. 196)
  • Photography and Virgin Land (Chapter XVI, p. 180)
  • Bloody Kansas (Chapter XV, p. 169)
  • Hamlin Garland, The Lion's Paw (Chapter XXI, p. 248)
  • Slavery in Virgin Land (Chapter XIII, p. 153)
  • Buffalo Bill (Chapter IX, p. 102)
  • Walt Whitman's Virgin Land (Chapter IV, various)
  • Kit Carson (Chapter VIII, p. 81)
  • Daniel Boone (Chapter V, p. 83)
  • The West in Silent Films(various).
  • The Domestic Frontier: The West in Women's Personal Narratives
  • West to the Garden: Early Versions of the Myth of the American Garden
  • Comic Anti-Heroes in Southwestern Humor
  • The Yeoman and the Cracker
  • Romancing the Indian: Sentimentalizing and Demonizing in Cooper and Twain
  Synoptic Version of Virgin Land